Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

this chapter. And, it is, after all, a syntactic pattern familiar from the center-embedding
genitive construction in Sumerian.
Example Syntactic form Genitive parallel
13 [PP Loc bi 2]-√ [NP-Loc]
14 [PP Loc/Erg NP Bare bi 2]-√ [NP NP-Gen]
15 [PP Loc/Erg [PP LocTerm NP Bare (bi 2)] bi 2]-√ [NP [NP NP-Gen]-Gen]
As I will argue in explicit terms later on, a number of factors indicate that the *bi-√ prefix
is quite similar to the expletive there in English existential sentences such as “there is a
dog in the parlor.” This obviously corresponds in certain respects to the traditional notion
that the *bi-√ prefix “agrees” with a locative argument, but I would like to emphasize two
fundamental distinctions before moving on to the next section. If the *bi-√ prefix is
similar to the expletive there in English existential sentences, then one might expect it to
regularly occur with locative arguments. But it needs to be remembered that there does
not agree with the locative it occurs with, it simply occurs in certain syntactic
configurations that also typically include locative arguments. In other words, it is a matter
of syntax rather than a morphologically-driven agreement relation that holds between a
morpheme on the verb and a locative phrase in the clause. The other difference between
the traditional agreement-based interpretation and my suggestion that the bi-√ prefix is
analogous to expletive “there” is that the use of expletive “there” in English has far
reaching syntactic implications for case-marking, quantification and focus constructions.
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